We Rely On Your Support: This site is primarily supported by advertisements. Ads are what have allowed this site to be maintained for the past 13 years. We do our best to ensure only clean, relevant ads are shown, when any nasty ads are detected, we work to remove them ASAP. If you would like to view the site without ads while still supporting our work, please consider our ad-free Phoronix Premium. You can also consider a tip via PayPal.

Alan Cox, the venerable Linux kernel developer presently employed by Intel and an avid open-source enthusiast, has lashed out against the recent release of Fedora 18. Cox calls the new Fedora release, "the worst Red Hat distro I've ever seen." Alan ended up switching to Ubuntu as a result of his disastrous experience with Fedora 18.

The new installer is unusable, the updater is buggy. When you get it running the default desktop has been eviscerated to the point of being slightly less useful than a chocolate teapot, and instead of fixing the bugs in it they've added more.

It can't even manage to write valid initrds for itself instead on one machine of simply bombing into a near undebuggable systemd error (same kernel with F17 and F17 dracut works so its the dracut stuff)

Most stuff seems to have gone fine so far. The cunning plan to do some jitsu with the VM I decided against in the end - its doable but the VM thinks its on /dev/vda1 and /dev/vda1 is in fact an encrypted volume across a two disk md on the real host so fiddly.

It's mostly behaving but the monitor configuration tools suck and are so buggy I took joe to monitors.xml instead. The biggest problem though was the orange.. that had to go. It's now blue - something Fedora gets right ;-)

OpenSCAD is out of date (ok thats mean the new one is only a week or so old)

My experiences with Fedora 18 haven't been quite so bad, though it's not my favorite release in having used Fedora itself since the Fedora Core 3 "Heidelberg" days. Though I do really hate the Anaconda changes found in Fedora 18.

You can share your Fedora 18 experiences with the Phoronix community by using the comment link below.

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 10,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

The mission at Phoronix since 2004 has centered around enriching the Linux hardware experience. In addition to supporting our site through advertisements, you can help by subscribing to Phoronix Premium. You can also use our Amazon.com or NewEgg.com shopping links when making online purchases or contribute to Phoronix through a PayPal tip.